One Response to Defending What Doesn’t Work?: Catholic Education–New Post on Slugger O’Toole

This may be one of the rare times we agree Gladys. I’ve experience of Catholic Education in the north and it was very poor. All the boys left school at 18 without any grounding in Catholic faith. It was only when I got to uni in England that I started to study the faith, and realise all the richness which I had been deprived – my baptismal right – all those years.

Catholic Education in Ireland is, in my experience, a sham, and I agree with your comment about defending something that does not, and is not, working.

”Mooney wants parents to have a ‘real choice’: one where in ‘some schools Catholic faith formation is an integral part of the curriculum and an alternate patronage model’ where faith teaching is not required.

I agree with his reasoning, which he elaborates:

I believe that there is nothing more destructive to the faith of a child than to be catechised and prepared for sacraments by teachers who are not themselves practising Catholics.

I believe this kind of hypocrisy undermines our civic society and personal morality. And we have had very serious failures of business ethics in this society in the past two decades.”

Too true. As far as I am concerned ‘Catholic Education’ is another rotten edifice which must come crashing down.

I say this as a believing Catholic, and so can I can say it without fear – the Church has a lot of rot in it. The sex abuse is only the tip of the ice berg. We need all that is sham and facade to come crashing down, and the sooner the better.

I’ve not given it much thought and I don’t have much insight into it, but 50% of schools to be retained by the RCC seems very generous.

What I want to see is the availability of good, solid, dynamic, orthodox and totally un-apologetical schools for children of practising Catholic families. My only concern is how to achieve this whilst making sure a good Catholic education is available to all children, not just the wealthy ones who can afford to keep up a facade of being Catholic. We need authenticity and sincerity.

We’ve had enough rotten hypocrisy and I’m sick to the stomach of it.

I want to see a smaller, purer Catholic Church here in Ireland which lives the live of Christ from the heart. Click on my name to read this same vision of Pope Benedict.

Welcome to Building a Church Without Walls, a website for people who are excited about how Christianity is developing in the 21st Century. I am a Research Fellow in the Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen's University Belfast. We offer a Master's in Conflict Transformation and Social Justice.

This is my personal site. All views are my own and are not representative of Queen's. I also write for the popular NI Politics site Slugger O'Toole.

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"In The Deconstructed Church, two veteran sociologists of religion give us our most extensive, comprehensive, and revealing ethnographic study of the worldwide phenomenon known as the emerging Christian movement ..." - William H. Willimon